Jurassic World Evolution review: The park doesn’t HAVE to be gone

Just in case you can’t leave the idea of a dinosaur-filled theme park behind, you can take your own shot at running one and deal with the same issues you’ve seen in the movies.

For some reason, Jurassic Park didn’t dissuade people from building an amusement park filled with actual, honest to goodness dinosaurs in it. Jurassic World finally did, as its sequel fittingly featured the tag line “The Park is Gone.” However, just because the people who ran the parks in movies couldn’t handle life finding a way doesn’t mean you can’t right? Jurassic World Evolution gives you a chance to prove you’d have done it better.

The product of Frontier Developments, Jurassic World Evolution is on one hand, a classic theme park simulator. Beginning with a certain amount of funds, your initial job is to attract more guests to your fledgling attraction, providing them with attractions they want to see while monitoring things like whether they feel they have enough places to shop, eat and stay. There are buildings to construct, power and accessibility concerns to manage, and you can even build a monorail to get people from Point A to Point B without walking.

The biggest differences between this and other theme park sims are large, walking ones. What the people want to see are dinosaurs, and thanks to the magic of DNA preserved in amber and such, you can give them what they want. You start the game with only a few species at your fingertips, but a big part of your ongoing efforts revolve around how to provide more. If your park is turning a profit, you can sink funds into expeditions to find more DNA, eventually unlocking even more dinosaurs. Further along, you can tinker even more with what humans should probably not, mixing in genetic modifications to make dinosaurs with different color variations, longer lifespans and yes, even hybrids if you really want to go that route.

Time does pass as you run your park, but Jurassic World Evolution doesn’t put that much time pressure on you, which is a good thing because unlocking the five different islands in the game’s career mode means juggling a number of different potential difficulties besides time and money. Various corporate types will vie for your attention and funds, each with their own agendas. Different species need different habitats, requiring specific amounts of grassland and forest, the proper food and water supplies, and even the right mix of other dinos in the same habitat. Storms can threaten your entire park as well, and when things go bad wrong, the dinosaurs can even escape their enclosures and threaten your guests. Hey, this is a Jurassic World game, and Dr. Ian Malcolm did warn us, more than once.

There are an impressive amount of tools at your disposal to try to prevent life from finding a way, and a pleasant surprise is that you can actually take the wheel of a ranger team and tackle repair or dinosaur disease control missions by hand if you so choose. That’s actually the best way to get up close and personal with the game’s lush visuals, which really do present the dinosaurs in an awesome light when you see them. Add in the classic music cues sprinkled throughout and the real actors voicing Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Dr. Henry Wu (Bryce Dallas Howard) and you’ll love the audio more than you’ll miss the fact that Chris Pratt isn’t in the mix. The guests are perhaps the weakest part of the graphical elements, but no one is really looking at them in a game like this anyway.

While the career mode has enough challenge with five very different environments to offer hours of enjoyment, there’s also the chance to unlock Isla Nublar, the site of both the original Jurassic Park and the two most recent Jurassic World movies — no word, though, if you have to worry about the active volcano that apparently lurks there. That island gives you a full-fledged sandbox area with no financial worries to build exactly the park you imagine, something that many sims promise but not all of them deliver. However, you’ll still need to research new species and new technologies in the career mode, so there’s some built-in replayability involved.

A few AI hiccups pop up from time to time while you play that will make you ask some questions. Why don’t guests hold a grudge when one (or more) ends up as dino food? How come you can tranquilize dinosaurs any time you want for as long as you want without any repercussions? So it’s probably fair to say that this isn’t the most realistic theme park simulation ever made, but then again, it’s about dinosaurs brought back to life to serve as the main draws, so it’s quite possible we’re overthinking it if we harp on those things too much.

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In other words, the dev team at Frontier Developments has put together a really fun way to pretend you’re actually in charge of Jurassic World without making it overly complicated. Fans of the source material are definitely going to want to take their own shot at keeping the park going, and plenty of other people will probably enjoy Jurassic World Evolution as well. Just remember that life finds a way isn’t just a fun catchphrase for Goldblum to say, because it’s going to be relevant if you play for any length of time.

Final score: 8/10

Disclosure: FanSided.com was provided with a free review code of Jurassic World Evolution for the purposes of this review.